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One Nation, Under Ice

The jury is out on the practice of raising the windshield wipers during snowy/icy conditions: it's intended to prevent the blades from freezing to the glass, but some say that it's not worth the trouble. Raised like antennae, they could well be sensors activated by atmospheric conditions, or insect legs, a gesture of beseeching the firmament for respite or simply resigning to a snowy fate.

It's been a rough winter by any measure, what with the salt shortages and architecture fails, but I only recently learned that the entire country of Slovenia was essentially covered in ice for several days. The freak storm struck two weeks ago and lasted three days, blanketing the some 8,000 square miles (20,000 km2) with 10cm of ice, causing upwards of €66 milliion in damage, including widespread power outages and ravaging half of the alpine nation's forests.

Ray is a contributor to Core77. Aside from design, his interests include art, music, cycling, urbanism, food, patterns, maps, coffee and em-dashes—seriously, he includes at least one in every post he writes.

Nope, those aren't 3D-printed; they're handmade. Ex-chemistry teacher Bobby Jaber—the giveaway to his old profession is that he refers to PVC as polyvinyl chloride—"wanted to combine art and science," and now that he's retired, has thrown himself wholeheartedly into clay. Buckyballs, icosahedrons, octahedrals and other complex geometrics might not be...

Speaking of Walnut, filmmaker Tristan Stoch of Cineastas recently sent us a quick note, correctly conjecturing that we "might be interested in this latest video." After all, we were all ears when we first came across Geoffrey Franklin's story back in March 2011, and we've seen a couple new products...

Reporting by Kat BaumanIn its first iteration, the Leatherman multi-tool was a Double-Oh-Seven-worthy gadget idea, born out of a traveler's frustration and initially snubbed by major tool companies. These days, Leatherman is a synonym for any dozen-in-one dream tool you can fit in a pocket. The idea came to Tim...

So here's a rather painful video of musician and Director of Creative Innovation at Intel will.i.am sharing his thoughts on logo design. Watch... if you dare:Michael Bierut surmises that he lost a bet, but it turns out that it's kind of a real thing: apparently Mr., um, am is involved...